Nikola Tesla (1856-1943)

In 1893 Tesla and Westinghouse got the contract to install all the electrical
and lighting systems for the Chicago World's Fair. This was the the first
World's Fair with electricity and would prove that alternating current was
the electrical system of the future. After the World's Fair everybody believed
in Tesla's alternating current and soon the whole country had switched to
Tesla's system.

Westinghouse won the coveted contract to harness Niagara, bidding half of
what Edison bid for the installation of a DC system. Tesla's success on
the World's Fair was a factor in winning the contract to install the first
power machinery at Niagara Falls, which bore Tesla's name and patent numbers.
In 1895, the Niagara AC power system enjoyed a flawless inauguration, transmitting
electricity to Buffalo twenty-two miles away, a complete impossibility in the
suddenly outmoded world of direct current. No longer a curious luxury reserved
for the urban upper class, electric power in the home would now be commonplace.
For the first time in his life, Nikola Tesla was an indisputable success.

Tesla Lab Institute Tesla's New York laboratory was a hive of continuous
activity, with a small staff of assistants working solely from their employer's
verbal instructions. His distaste for putting ideas down on paper, coupled with
his tendency to get bored with a completed invention and move on to the next
challenge, led Tesla to toss aside a large number of creations that he never
even bothered to patent.

Once, when exhaustion left Tesla in a state of temporary amnesia, his assistant
filed for patents on many of the unregistered inventions on Tesla's behalf,
and had the master sign the papers while still incapacitated. Tesla's shunning
of documentation was of some benefit when fire destroyed the lab in 1895, right
after the success at Niagara. The loss was a setback, but not a catastrophic
one, since the most valuable of the laboratory's assets remained intact
in Tesla's brain.

The wireless transmission of energy would become the ultimate pursuit of
Tesla's career. He discovered that a vacuum tube held in proximity to a
Tesla coil would burst into illumination, without wires, without even a filament
inside the glowing tube. Electrical resonance was the key to this discovery.
By determining the frequency of the needed electrical current, Tesla was able
to turn a series of different lights on and off selectively, from yards away.

As the years passed, Tesla's vision of wireless energy grew even grander
in scope. He solved one of the problems implicit in his first theory, which
was that transmission of power through air over long distances would result
in a significant loss of energy. Rather than using air as a medium, he decided
to send energy through the ground. This makes little sense in conventional electrical
terms, whereby the earth's surface is regarded as, literally, "the
ground" -- a sinkhole used for discharging excess current from a conductor.
But Tesla found that if it were charged highly enough, the ground could become
the conductor itself. In this way, the entire planet could be transformed into
a colossal electric transmitter.

In 1899, as logistics prevented him from conducting the necessary experiments
within the confines of New York City, Tesla headed west. A Colorado attorney
named Leonard Curtis, who had previously defended Tesla in court, offered to
help Tesla set up a testing facility in Colorado Springs. Curtis was also an
officer of the local power company, and provided electricity to Tesla at no
cost.

Tesla and his assistants built a one-of-a-kind laboratory on the outskirts
of town, which looked like a large barn topped by a 180-foot metal tower. This
was Tesla's "magnifying transformer," which he called the greatest
of his inventions. The towns people of Colorado Springs were naturally curious
about what this great inventor was up to, and respected the signs around the
perimeter of the compound reading "KEEP OUT -- GREAT
DANGER!"

Still, they soon felt the effects of Tesla's apparatus. Sparks leapt
from the ground as people walked the streets, singeing their feet through their
shoes. The grass around the Tesla building glowed with a faint blue light. Metal
objects held near fire hydrants would draw miniature lightning bolts from several
inches away. Switched-off light bulbs within 100 feet of the tower spontaneously
lit.

And Tesla was only tuning up his equipment. These were the side effects of
adjusting the magnifying transformer into perfect resonance with the earth.
Once it was properly calibrated, Tesla was ready to conduct his career's
boldest symphony, using the entire planet as his orchestra.

Late one night in the fall of 1899, Tesla fired up his machine at full blast,
in hopes of producing a phenomenon he called resonant rise. His tower pumped
ten million volts into the earth's surface. The current raced through the
earth at the speed of light, powerful enough to keep from dying out over the
course of its journey. When it reached the opposite side of the planet, it bounced
back, like ripples of water returning
to their origin. Upon returning, the current was greatly weakened; but Tesla
was sending out a series of pulses which reinforced one another, resulting in
a tremendous cumulative effect.

At ground zero, where Tesla and his assistant stood bedazzled, the resonant
rise manifested itself in an unearthly display of lightning that still stands
as the most powerful man-made electrical surge in history. The returning current
formed an arc of lightning that stretched skyward from Tesla's tower and
progressively grew to an incredible 130 feet long. Apocalyptic crashes of thunder
were heard twenty-two miles away. Tesla had been concerned that there might
be an upper limit to generating resonant surges, but now he believed the potential
was limitless. The demonstration did come to an unexpected halt, but that was
because the power surge caused the overloaded Colorado Springs power generator
to burst into flames. Tesla received no further free power from the plant's
furious owners.

He returned to New York in search of backing for the global implementation
of a resonant energy system. Now cognizant of the business world's inevitable
reluctance to support giving away free energy, Tesla pitched his new project
as a means of transmitting communication, rather than electrical power. George
Westinghouse passed on the idea. Tesla next proposed it to J. P. Morgan, the
wealthiest man in America, who had previously declined to finance the inventor.
The idea of a monopoly on world communications intrigued Morgan, and he enabled
Tesla to build a new laboratory on Long Island. Named Wardenclyffe, it was to
be a bigger and better version of his Colorado facility.

The project was abandoned because of a financial panic, labor troubles, and
Morgan's withdrawal of support. It was Tesla's greatest defeat. Two
years later a man named Marconi came out with a wireless radio in London. His
equipment was exactly what Tesla had demonstrated in St. Louis two years earlier,
and had been published around the world. Marconi said he had never read about
Tesla's design, so Marconi was credited with inventing the radio. However,
twenty years later they went to court and Tesla won. He is now recognized as
the real inventor of the radio.

The first Tesla invention with a proposed military use was his automaton
technology, with which the labor of human beings could be performed by machines.
Specifically, Tesla produced remote-controlled boats and submarines. He demonstrated
the wireless ship at an exposition in Madison Square Garden in 1898. The automaton
apparatus was so advanced, it used a form of voice recognition to respond to
the verbal commands of Tesla and volunteers from the audience.

In public, Tesla spoke only of the humanitarian virtues of the invention:
it would lessen the toils and drudgery of mankind and keep human lives out of
harm's way. But Tesla actually had his hopes on a contract with the U.S.
military. In a presentation before the War Department, Tesla argued that his
unmanned torpedo craft could obliterate the Spanish Armada and end the war with
Spain in an afternoon. The government never took Tesla up on his offer.

Tesla eventually landed a successful military contract, with the German Marine
High Command. The product here was not unmanned sea craft, but sophisticated
turbines which Admiral von Tirpitz used to great success in his fleet of warships.
After J. P. Morgan cut off his support of Wardenclyffe, this foreign contract
was Tesla's only substantial source of income. Upon the outbreak of World
War I, Tesla chose to forfeit his German royalties, lest he be charged with
treason.

Nearly broke, and finding the United States on the brink of war, Tesla dreamed
up a new invention that might interest the military: the death ray. The mechanism
behind Tesla's death ray is not well understood. It was apparently some
sort of particle accelerator. Tesla said it was an outgrowth of his magnifying
transformer, which focused its energy output into a thin beam so concentrated
it would not scatter, even over huge distances. He promoted the device as a
purely defensive weapon, intended to knock down incoming attacks, making the
death ray the great-great grandfather of the Strategic Defense Initiative.

Six years later, the onset of the First World War caused Tesla to reconsider.
He wrote to President Wilson, revealing his secret death ray test. He offered
to rebuild the weapon for the War Department, to be used purely as a deterrent.
The mere threat of such destructive force, he claimed, would cause the warring
nations to agree at once to establish lasting peace. The only response to Tesla's
proposal was a form letter of appreciation from the president's secretary.
The death ray was never reconstructed, and for that we should probably all be
thankful.

Tesla made one one further attempt to aid in his country's war effort.
In 1917, he conceived of a sending station that would emit exploratory waves
of energy, enabling its operators to determine the precise location of distant
enemy craft. The War Department rejected Tesla's "exploring ray"
as a laughing stock. A generation later, a new invention exactly like this helped
the Allies win World War II. It was called radar.

Tesla's work then shifted to turbines and other projects. Because of
a lack of funds, his ideas remained in his notebooks, which are still examined
by engineers for unexploited clues. In 1915 he was severely disappointed when
a report that he and Edison were to share the Nobel Prize proved erroneous.
Tesla was the recipient of the Edison Medal in 1917, the highest honor that
the American Institute of Electrical Engineers could bestow.

From the April 1895 Century Magazine Tesla allowed himself only a few close
friends. Among them were the writers Robert Underwood Johnson, Mark Twain, and
Francis Marion Crawford. He was quite impractical in financial matters and an
eccentric, driven by compulsions and a progressive germ phobia. But he had a
way of intuitively sensing hidden scientific secrets and employing his inventive
talent to prove his hypotheses. Tesla was a godsend to reporters who sought
sensational copy but a problem to editors who were uncertain how seriously his
futuristic prophecies should be regarded. Caustic criticism greeted his speculations
concerning communication with other planets, his assertions that he could split
the Earth like an apple, and his claim of having invented a death ray capable
of destroying 10,000 airplanes at a distance of 250 miles (400 kilometres).

Tesla's ideas seemed to grow markedly weirder in his later years. Forever
restless, and untethered by concerns of practicality and marketability, Tesla's
mind spawned a vast miscellany of odd inventions. Many of these were never developed
beyond the concept stage, and the ideas seemed to grow markedly weirder in the
final years of Tesla's life. Invention was normally a deliberate process
for Tesla, his every intention and goal fully formed before he and his crew
lifted a finger. But there were times when he stumbled upon a new discovery
by mistake. Tesla performed his first experiments with resonance technology
at his New York laboratory by firing up a small oscillator, which caused a minor
amount of vibration. Suddenly, an alarmed squad of police officers stormed into
the lab, demanding that Tesla stop at once. Manhattan was shaking for miles
around. Tesla had not taken into account how resonance waves grow stronger the
further they travel from their source. He had unintentionally created what became
known as Tesla's earthquake machine.

Tesla in his lab in New York Tesla also applied his resonance engines in
bizarre forms of physical therapy. He created machines that flooded the human
body with electrical currents and strong vibrations, intended to soothe aches
and promote healing. And Tesla wasn't just the inventor of the "electrotherapeutic"
device -- he was also a client. He reportedly became somewhat addicted to administering
the treatment to himself, insisting that a session with the machine rejuvenated
him on his long stretches of work without food or sleep. Tesla once let his
friend Samuel Clemens try out the healing machine. The author is said to have
enjoyed the experience tremendously, until the vibrations brought him a case
of spontaneous diarrhea. Tesla marketed this invention, and the Tesla Electrotherapeutic
Company was one of the few commercial enterprises of his old age that was marginally
successful.

Tesla gained another accidental revelation during his testing of the magnifying
transformer in Colorado Springs. One evening during the construction of the
device, the apparatus began to sound out a series of precise clicks, similar
to Morse code. Tesla was convinced that these were signals being sent by extraterrestrial
life. Tesla had expressed his belief in life on Mars, and now he thought he
had proof. He later conceived of transmitters for communicating with Martians,
espousing his view that the establishment of peaceful relations with our neighbors
from outer space was among the most pressing duties that lay before humanity.

On his 75th birthday in 1931, the inventor appeared on the cover of Time
Magazine. On this occasion, Tesla received congratulatory letters from more
than 70 pioneers in science and engineering including Albert Einstein and Mark
Twain. These letters were mounted and presented to Tesla in the form of a testimonial
volume.

In his later years, Tesla was fascinated with the idea of light as both a
particle and a wave, the fundamental proposition of what would become quantum
physics. This field of inquiry led to the development of his death ray. Tesla
also had the idea of creating a "wall of light" by manipulating electromagnetic
waves in a certain pattern. This mysterious wall of light would enable time,
space, gravity and matter to be altered at will, and engendered an array of
Tesla proposals that seem to leap straight out of science fiction, including
anti-gravity airships, teleportation and time travel.

Nikola Tesla died on January 7th, 1943, at the age of 87 in Hotel New Yorker,
in Manhattan. He was virtually penniless, living at the dilapidated Hotel New
Yorker in a room that he shared with a flock of pigeons, which he considered
his only friends. Immediately after Tesla’s death, Tesla scientific papers
vanished from his hotel room in Hotel New Yorker. Tesla papers were never found.
Tesla papers contained scientific data and information about “Death Rays”,
which could be used for military purposes.